I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

When my children were small, we only went to the movie theater a few times a year.

It was a rare treat.

One of those times, when my son must have been only four or so years old, sticks in my mind.

We were getting ready to leave the house, meaning I was probably reminding him for the umpteenth time to put his shoes on, when he said, let's get there early. I want to see the scraps of other movies.

That phrase stopped me in my tracks, the scraps of other movies. Previews. He meant previews.

I still jokingly used this phrase with him, though now he's a middle schooler.

It's funny how metaphors are so baked into our language that it's completely reasonable for a small child to use a term

for fabric or paper to describe something he didn't have the word for. Across mediums, for centuries,

scraps have been useful, even beautiful. For example, there's the Sento, an Italian form that is collaged together from the lines of other poems.

Asento is a poem sewn together using the scraps of other poems. I love working on Ascento when I'm stuck or uninspired. I don't need to write anything

new to be writing. I can take a visit to my bookshelf or the library or the enormous treasure

trove of poems on the internet, finding lines that I put together to form a new whole,

something I get to call my own. Today's poem is a cento composed from lines from poets

Justin Philip Reed, Hugh Min Nguyen, Fatima Ascar, Kava Akbar, Sam Sacks, Ari Banjas, C. Bain, Oliver

Baez Bendorf, Hanif Abdurakib, Safia El Hilo, Denez Smith, Ocean Vong, Franny Choi, Lucille Clifton, and Nate Marshall.

And I admire this poem because although it was made from scraps of language, it makes wholeness

its business. To me, this poem is about the power

of community and the necessity of friendship for our collective survival, collective freedom, and collective

joy. It's about the ways we can make the world more habitable and more hospitable

for one another. In times that feel divisive and fragmented, this poem is a reminder of

what we can do and be together. It's a reminder of the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

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